I made him kiss her.
Or maybe she made him kiss her. Even now, even here, even after everything, it was hard to tell where my mind ended and hers began.
I had to turn away and pretend there was something wrong with my earpiece when she whispered against his lips that she had hard edges. For a few moments, I was genuinely worried I was going to vomit.
As soon as we were done, I made up some story about a network fire I needed to put out, and fled. I grabbed some food from craft services, locked myself away in the war room, and threw myself into work.
This, I knew how to do. This wasn’t the least bit confusing. This, I could exert all the control in the world over.
The date might have been a clusterfuck, but putting together the story of the date was simple. Even an untrained eye would have been able to pick out the pieces of the narrative puzzle. The desire of the Convent women to get back in the game. The determination of the Villa women to stop them.
The danger that the feud between Juliet-Dylan and Lily might sabotage them. I isolated a grab from Rani, one of the Convent women. ‘We can all see that Lily Fireball and girl-Dylan hate each other, right?’ she said to their team huddle. ‘That’s our opening. If we can turn them against each other and make them fight among themselves, we’ve got this.’
I tapped my fingers against the table. Lily obviously wasn’t going to back off Juliet-Dylan, no matter what I said, so in story terms, my best bet was to steer into the skid. If I couldn’t get the classic, pristine, rising-above-the-drama winner edit I’d originally wanted, then I’d have to lean into positioning Juliet-Dylan as a hero figure. I could keep feeding contestants to Lily the way I’d fed Cece to her on the first night, but Juliet-Dylan would be the one person she couldn’t destroy.
Of course, to do that, to make Juliet-Dylan a hero, I’d have to lean even harder into Lily as the villain. She couldn’t just be a mean girl. I’d have to edit her as a monster for the ages, one that audiences would remember foryears.
Just like she wanted me to.
I was an extremely good, extremely convincing liar, but there was no way I could pretend to myself that the white-hot nausea gripping my entire body was only coming from the deeply unhealthy amount of coffee I’d been drinking.
I let my head fall to the table. My mind felt like it was circling a drain.
Why? Why was she doing this? She wasn’t just doing this to herself. She wasn’t just burning her own life down. She was doing it to me too.
I’m all hard edges.I need someone soft, to balance me out.
She couldn’t say those words without knowing what they would mean to me, how they would hurt me. She just couldn’t.
I should have gone back to my trailer after our production meeting, or assigned some of the dailies to Suzette or Carrie, but I sent them away and lingered in the war room, scrolling through footage of Dylan JM and Cece. If I stopped working, I’d start thinking, and old wounds I’d worked incredibly hard to close would start gushing blood.
The door of the war room rattled. I glanced over at it. I’d put a chair underneath the handle after Carrie and Suzette had left.
‘… they fell in love super quickly,’ Romeo-Dylan was saying on the monitor, midway through telling Cece the story of how his parents got together. ‘Not quite love at first sight, but fast. Weeks, not years.’
‘Murray?’ Lily called through the door.
‘Go away.’
She knocked.
I didn’t answer.
She kept knocking.
‘He told me that falling in love was simple,’ Romeo-Dylan said, ‘but that isn’t what love really is.’
‘Murray, please.’
I paused playback. ‘What?’
‘Will you let me in?’
‘Why should I?’
A moment of silence.
‘Can we talk?’ she said.
